Studies have shown that sixty percent of application development and testing time is devoted to data-related tasks. Reducing time spent on test data management is critical in controlling IT costs and keeping developers focused on the task at hand—developing new applications and managing existing ones. To design and build reliable applications today, however, entails a complex process involving a range of different and unfamiliar databases and file types. Often developers spend more time dealing with data-related issues than developing the actual application itself.
Various software applications interact with large amounts of data stored in relational databases. In order to test such applications, a smaller subset of data is frequently used; sometimes—with certain attributes modified to comply with data privacy rules. In order for such a subset to properly represent the original data, it typically must guarantee referential integrity, which can include not only the standard primary/foreign keys relationships, but also other relationships between attributes expected by the application. Often such data subsets are required to be “complete”, meaning that it includes all child entries for which their parent is included into the subset. Therefore, it is desirable to provide efficient and reliable techniques for constructing minimum supersets of data that comply with referential integrity rules.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.